Sales Email Template & Examples That Actually Get Read

The secret to a successful sales email is to personalize your message. Using a strong sales email template, like the ones we’ve provided, is a good start, but you’ll ultimately need to customize your intro, pitch and call-to-action in order to attract your recipient’s attention.

In this guide, we share 7 different email templates, each personalized in a different way, depending on how you found the prospect. We’ll also explore how to track opens and test email effectiveness using a CRM like Pipedrive, or an email automation platform like Mailchimp.

Free Sales Email Template

The above is an example of an effective sales email template that follows the best practices to high-performing sales emails. The key is to understand the principles and then start creating and testing different use-cases based on the same principles.

The 5 key elements of a successful sales email template are:

The subject line – this needs to be personalized, because an email from a complete stranger is easy to overlook

The opening line – this needs to be about the prospect, not about you

The offer – this needs to be either a brief pitch or an offer to help

The close – this should be simple and not salesy

The signature – keep it simple; just you name, direct phone number and website URL

More Sales Email Templates For Different Scenarios

The following six use-cases cover the most powerful ways to make a personal connection. Once you get a feel for them, you can then experiment with your own bespoke templates using the step-by-step approach I’ve provided further below.

Use Case #1: Highlight a Priority

If you do your homework and are able to identify a current priority for your prospect, this can be a very effective way to initiate a new relationship.

Use Case #2: Highlight a Mutual Contact

Connecting via a mutual contact is a great way to make a personal connection. If Dave holds Gary in good regard, he’ll be sure to respond.

Use Case #3: Following a Conference

If you’ve had a brief meeting, or even if you had wanted to meet someone at a conference and were unable to, you can breathe life into a fledgling new relationship with the following sales email template:

Use Case #4: Create Rapport

Using sales intelligence tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator with help you to find a wide range of ways to generate rapport. An easy starting point is to find something that you have in common and even inject a little humour.

Use Case #5: Compliment The Lead

Let’s be honest, would you stop reading an email that opened by paying you a genuine compliment? Neither would I. This sales email template is great for connecting with influential industry experts and bloggers:

Use Case #6: Congratulate The Lead

We all like to be praised. The great this is that the things you are likely to congratulate are also events that make trigger fresh buying cycles, like change of job or change of location.

3 Additional Tips for Sales Email Success

Don’t Expect Too Much – Make it easy for people to respond without saying or asking for too much. For instance, don’t expect them to open attachments or answer time consuming questions, just ask if they are interested.

Follow Up Like a Demon – I recommend cold calling to follow-up. Most people don’t realize that it takes on 7-8 follow-up calls/emails before you can expect to engage most prospects.

Measure Performance, Refine & Improve – Make use of a powerful small business sales CRM like Pipedrive and integrate it with a good email automation tool like MailChimp. This way you can test different sales email templates to learn and improve. You can also automate follow-up emails.

How to Write a Sales Email: The Step-by-Step Process

A sales email template is a great way to get started. You also need a simple process that will help to ensure each sales email is effective at opening up new relationships.

These 7 steps will help you to create consistently high-performing sales emails:

Step 1 – Research Your Prospect

Properly personalized sales emails are far more effective than canned emails. As a result it makes a lot of sense to use intelligence tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to really know your prospect and select the best way to personalise your email. Genuine personalisation is crucial to your success.

Here are some examples of intelligence that you could use to help you personalise your introduction:

A mutual connection

Worked for the same company

Membership of the same society or interest group

Step 2 – Personalize Your Subject Line

Your subject line will have the biggest impact on whether or not your email gets opened or not.

The key is to establish a personal connection. Either address the contact by name, their company name, or a mutual connection that will help you to build immediate rapport. Here are some examples of good sales email subject lines:

“[Contact name], question for you”

“[Contact name], free for a conversation tomorrow?”

“[Mutual connection] recommended I get in touch”

Be Careful With Your Word Choice

Note that the first message fails to create a personal connection: “Have time for a quick meeting?” It also includes some words that are generally displeasing to recipients (“quick” and “meeting”). According to a survey by Hubspot, subtle word choices can have a huge impact on how many of your emails get opened:

Avoid “quick” and “meeting” – these words sound pesky and unappealing to people with busy schedules. Using them in the subject of an email reduces the chance of it getting opened by 17% and 7%, respectively.

If you want a timely response, use “tomorrow” – i.e. “free for a chat tomorrow?” Emails with the word “tomorrow” in the subject were 10% more likely to be opened than those without.

Likewise, the word “free” is a good addition. As in, “when are you free,” NOT “here’s a free prize!”

Step 3 – Make Your Opening Line About Them

The opener is the first line of the email body. Like the subject, they will appear in the recipient’s inbox.

One of the biggest mistakes is to talk about yourself in the first sentence. See the first message above: “My name is Luisa and I work for ABC Consulting.” At a glance, this comes across as overly formal and fails to make a personal connection. Instead, you should talk about your prospect. Here’s a few examples of tried and tested openers that work:

“Loved your post on [blog post topic]”

“I saw that we both [attended an event, are members of a group, etc.]”

“I noticed you’re still using [product]”

Step 4 – Pitch a Simple Offer

Next comes the purpose for your email. This may be your value proposition or an offer of help to help initiate a new relationship. Your pitch also has to be short and sweet and relevant to your prospect.

One way to do this is to open up with a question, then follow up with your value proposition. Here’s a couple of examples:

“What are you paying right now for credit card processing? We have merchant services with fees as low as 1.75% of credit card transaction value.”

“How much foot traffic are you getting in your store after 4pm? I couldn’t help noticing that your storefront is dimly lit. Would you like me to put you in touch with a good local lighting contractor I know personally?

Step 5 – Close Simply

The next part of the email is the “call to action.” They key is to keep it simple and non-salesy.Here’s a couple of examples:

“Let me know if you’re interested”

“Let me know if you’d like to discuss this further”

Step 6 – Add a Professional Signature

The final element of your sales email template is your signature. This will perform better if you keep it simple and easy to read. I recommend providing your direct phone number, email address and website URL and no more.

Step 7 – Analyze, Refine & Improve

Once you have grasped the basic principles of using a sales email template, you’ll soon be creating your own use cases. Beyond this, the improvement in your sales email performance with come from analysing how different elements of your email perform in a split test.

For instance, you could create a template and test two different types of subject line to see which achieves the best open rate for your business. When you send emails using a CRM like Pipedrive, or email marketing system like Mailchimp, it’s easy to measure open and click-through rates with simple reports.

The Bottom Line

A good sales email template will help you to understand the core principles and key steps in delivering sales emails that open-up new customer relationships.

Once you understand the principles, I would recommend experimenting around these core principles and measuring how your own bespoke sales emails perform. A good sales CRM like Pipedrive integrated with a small business email automation tool like MailChimp will provide the performance analytics you need and they’ll also make it easy to automate follow-up emails.

About the Author

Jeremy Marsan is a business analyst and staff writer for Fit Small Business currently specializing in small business healthcare issues and product reviews. When not helping small business owners he enjoys many artistic projects, including music performance/recording, blogging, creative writing and carpentry.

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Comments (10)Disclaimer: Reviews on FitSmallBusiness.com are the product of independent research by our writers, researchers, and editorial team. User reviews and comments are contributions from independent users not affiliated with FitSmallBusiness.com's editorial team. Banks, issuers, credit card companies, and other product & service providers are not responsible for any content posted on FitSmallBusiness.com. As such, they do not endorse or guarantee any posted comments or reviews.Post Your Comment

Nice post, thanks! For beginners it’s just great! Anyway, I wanted to ask you for advice, my team is working now to create the platform where you can copy your cold mail and our AI engine will check whether your CM is similar to others. So using it you will get the feedback about uniquness of your cold mail. Do you think that people working with email marketing would be interested in using such platform? Please write me back what you think. Our platform is coldmail.ai

Hi, its an interesting tool. The only thing I’m skeptical of is whether or not a high score is a good thing. You want your cold email to be unique, but it may also contain common elements that are known to be engaging with recipients.

Hi guys! Thanks for an amazing article. I’m not too advanced in the sphere of email sales, I’ve just started finding out about some resources and bumped into these: Remail, Apex Email Service , Distribution Deputy. I’d like to facilitate my working day. Maybe you can have reviews on some of there email dispatch softwares.

Thanks for the suggestion. We haven’t looked into these services. We usually recommend small businesses use a CRM with emailing tools for sales email dispatch, or an email marketing system like Mailchimp or Constant Contact for marketing dispatch.

The systems you listed could come in handy for businesses with a substantial amount of cold outreach, and for that reason, we’ll be sure to check them out for a review sometime in the future. But by and large, most small businesses will still be personalizing each cold email by hand, since this is the most effective way to get a response.

Definitely a great article, thanks for sharing such a great content. Personalization can really do great things for your sales. But I`ve been thinking – isn`t it better to personalize emails with the help of the services – such as remail.io?

Most salespeople will want to store their email templates directly in their CRM. So when you’re going through your list of contacts, you can immediately load the template, personalize it, and send it off. Pipedrive is probably one of the best systems for this, since they also have email tracking, in addition to email templates and CRM functionality.

Thanks for the compliment! You can use a regular email provider, or try special emailing software like Mailchimp or GetResponse that will track open rates. As we point out in our longform guide to writing sales emails, tracking the number of times people open your emails will help you optimize your messages – you can try out different emails and narrow it down to your most engaging one.

We recommend using Insightly for this, since it doubles as a free CRM.

Thanks for the reply, Jeremy! I might actually go for GetResponse. Tracking open rates is a big deal. A/B testing is also a good way to see what works. Thank you for the post recommendation. I’ll check it out soon!

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